A Westerner’s Take on a Soviet Crime
By Pauls Toutonghi
Special to The St. Petersburg Times
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For The St. Petersburg Times
In Tom Rob Smith’s novel, a serial killer is on the loose in a state that refuses to admit the possibility of murder.
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In this age of grisly televised violence and graphic reporting from the front lines of war, literary models are struggling to keep their hold on the popular imagination. A murder imagined from the page somehow lacks the immediacy of a murder witnessed on the screen. The thriller genre seems to be responding to this fact by escalating its brutality — often early on in the story. In the novels of crime writers such as James Patterson and Patricia Cornwell, the first few chapters have the feel of a ceremonial bloodletting. Tom Rob Smith’s debut novel is no exception to this pattern. For a time in “Child 44,” the body count competes with the page count. To make matters worse, the victims are children — wholly blameless, wholly innocent. Smith’s premise is simple: Someone, over the past 20 years, has been killing kids. The setting is the former Soviet Union, near the end of Stalin’s rule. And the central dramatic question is quite basic: Will Leo Stepanovich Demidov, a conflicted, amphetamine-addicted police inspector, manage to overcome his personal problems and bring this serial child-murderer to justice? Can he circumvent a system that has lost all sanity, that has branded him as a maverick and an outlaw? The Soviet state refuses to acknowledge that murder occurs in its new proletarian paradise. If Leo even admits that a serial killer is on the loose, he will have committed a treasonous act, one which pits him against the power structure of the government and the rest of the police force. If this seems familiar, there’s good reason for that. It is, at its core, the plot of nearly every gritty police procedural — one man against the system. The difference is that Smith has chosen to use the Soviet state as the book’s chief antagonistic force. And in the world of “Child 44,” the Soviet Union is a villain so big that it saturates everything. Every character is terrified of the system. Every character has internalized its brutality and seems to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. This version of the Soviet Union is the very epitome of George Orwell’s bleakest totalitarian nightmares. Indeed, Smith misses no opportunity to make the country seem sinister, setting the action in places with names like “Collective Farm 12,” “Orphanage 80” and ”Hospital 379.” Never are these numbered bureaucratic outposts even close to hospitable or inviting: “Orphanage 80 was a five-story brick building with faded white lettering painted on the side: WORK HARD LIVE LONG. On the roof there was a long line of chimneystacks. The orphanage had once been a small factory. Dirty rags hung across the barred windows, making it impossible to see inside.” The grimness — and griminess — would put Oliver Twist’s London to shame. Smith’s prodigious talents are obvious. “Child 44” is impeccably wrought and tense. The central question — Will the murderer be brought to justice? — gives the story a compelling and significant conflict. And Smith’s characters are torn in many directions and forced to make difficult choices. Leo, the protagonist, believes in the system that he serves, but this very belief proves to be his downfall. The things he suffers are the stuff of classical tragedy. He is the Aristotelian tragic figure writ large. It is easy to empathize with his plight. Because of this, the book is exciting. It’s hard to put down. Yet precisely because of how entertaining it is, “Child 44” raises the more sobering question of how to write about Soviet history without misusing it or casting the state as an easy villain. Nearly 20 years after the collapse of communism the Soviet Union’s legacy has yet to be unraveled. There’s a danger that this important historical epoch will become a cliche — fodder for sensationalism — and that it will lose its complexity in the popular imagination. If this does in fact happen, then the myriad values for which the Soviet state stood will simply fall by the wayside, as so much historical detritus. Was there state-induced paranoia in the Soviet period? Undoubtedly. But to reduce an entire society to a caricature of itself, as does Smith — that is a different matter.
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For The St. Petersburg Times
Published by Grand Central Publishing
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While avoiding the trap of sensationalism might not be the first thing on the minds of writers who are out to entertain, in Smith’s case there may also have been another force at work. Nearly every mainstream novelist daydreams: “What if I sell the movie rights? What would it be like to see this book in the movie theater? Who will play my protagonist? Is there a chance that he ... could he possibly be played by Brad Pitt?” As it happens, Smith is already an accomplished screenwriter, having written for both film and television. His experience in that world must have influenced his work on “Child 44.” Like Patterson or Cornwell’s popular novels, his text seems calculated for film. One can practically imagine the cinematographer’s notes in the margins: low f-stop, dissolve this shot, fade to black. Indeed, the film rights have already been sold to Fox 2000 Pictures, to be directed by Ridley Scott. This does raise a worry about the formulaic nature of some of the novel’s major plot points. Many of the scenes seem built for a screenplay. They’re short. They’re marked by an obvious turning point and often lead to reversals in the fortunes of the central characters. Yet while this sort of scene infrastructure can be helpful for a writer during the creation of a work, the key is making sure that the scaffolding doesn’t come through in the finished product. Furthermore, Smith makes certain stylistic choices that are completely baffling. All the dialogue, for example, is in italics. This seems almost unbelievable and is difficult to rationalize, since italics are hard on the eyes. Nor does the history of literature appear to offer any precedent for an entire novel with italicized dialogue. A biographical note: Tom Rob Smith is only 29 years old. He is clearly a writer in process; he’s still learning how to tell a story on the printed page. What he does well, he does extremely well, and these things are, ultimately, the core of storytelling. If “Child 44” is any indication, Smith may soon be a prodigious — and prolific — talent. It will be interesting to see this young writer develop as he makes his way through the literary marketplace and, undoubtedly, onto the big screen. Pauls Toutonghi is the author of the novel “Red Weather” and a professor of English and creative writing at Lewis and Clark College.
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